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The Healthline Interview: Director Phyllida Lloyd on The Iron Lady

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Margaret Thatcher earned the
nickname “Iron Lady” for her unwillingness to bend on her policies during her
term as the UK’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990. But well into her 80s, she is rendered
powerless by Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative form of dementia, which impacts
memory, thinking, and behavior. The
upcoming film The Iron Lady, out
January 13, takes a brave look at this still taboo, rarely explored disease and
presents a softer, more vulnerable side of the former prime minister. In her Golden Globe-nominated performance as
Thatcher, Meryl Streep explores the devastating effects of Alzheimer’s with a
unique honesty and compassion. The result is a journey through a highly
publicized history recounted through Thatcher’s memories as she grapples with her
loss of control, confidence, and sense of self. Healthline sat down with The Iron Lady director Phyllida Lloyd — perhaps best
known for directing the box office smash Mamma Mia! — to discuss her connection to Alzheimer’s disease, how Meryl Streep
got into character, and the media’s reluctance to address this dreaded
cognitive disorder, which, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, affects
over five million people in the U.S. alone.

Alzheimer’s disease
is a touchy subject in the U.S. Is it openly talked about in Britain?

Phyllida Lloyd: All of us working on the movie were very
committed to trying to put a story that tackled dementia onto the screen. There
really isn’t enough discussion of it. This story of Margaret Thatcher’s
dementia was put into the public domain by her daughter, Carol, who wrote a
book discussing it in which she describes the first moment she realizes that her
mother’s mind is in some way struggling to compute various thoughts. And so we
gathered that Carol Thatcher wanted this [film] to get beyond the taboo subject
of it.

PL: Meryl Streep, Abi Morgan, and myself have had experience
[with] dementia sufferers and it was something that we were personally committed
to exploring. The wall between being so-called ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ is a very
thin one and all of us do things that make us feel: ‘Gosh, am I entirely in
control of my mental state?’ [We] wanted to sort of close that gap between
those of us who think we’re totally in control and are ‘sane’ and somebody
who’s classified as insane, to bring those people together to make [them] feel
more connected and more empathetic to the condition.

Meryl Streep is known
for her ability to transform into the characters she’s playing, and she
certainly did that in this challenging role.

PL: One of the things about Meryl Streep is that her vision
for a project goes so way beyond ‘What does my character do?’ and ‘When do we
start?’ and ‘When do we finish?’ Her sphere of interest is so enormous and her
investment in the project is so total and collaborative. The experience for all
three of us was a personal one that exploded the notion of a biopic, because we
wanted the audience to recognize themselves in this story somewhere. We’ve all
got careers; we’ve all got some kind of home life. How do you juggle those two
things and then how do you deal with that loss of power and facility and
fitness? How do you make that transition into that next phase of your life? And
in many ways [Margaret Thatcher’s] story is like our stories, but magnified to
the max. It’s a sort of larger version of perhaps the lives that we’re living.

When an actor is
portraying someone with cognitive disorder, it’s always a bit of a fine line between
accuracy and parody. Meryl Streep did such an amazing job pulling off a
sensitive, yet authentic portrayal. Did she have any special training?

PL: All three of us working on it had had friends or family
who had been sufferers, so there was personal experience to draw on. But I
think that it was also that she didn’t regard it as something totally separate
from her own experience. In other words, losing where you are in the middle of
a dinner party, losing the plot, missing a beat, and not ‘being there’ is
something we all do. It didn’t feel like, ‘Now I have to act like a mad person
in a demented state.’ It was something so close to everyday experience.

PL: I spent time in a hospital for patients suffering from
dementia and we had a consultant psychiatrist who was a specialist in dementia
who helped advise us. He wasn’t on the set, but he was someone that we spoke to
in trying to understand how the condition worked and the impact [it has] on
families. That’s something we wanted to really try and show, how delicate those
negotiations are with [caretakers] and how traumatic it is for the [caretaker].
Like the daughter, Carol, can’t be quite sure whether her mother is punishing
her, if she really feels she’s inadequate, or whether that’s part of her
condition. Again, it’s something that goes beyond biopic and becomes a sort of universal
dynamic, a story that — even if we haven’t experienced it — we can all imagine. It’s taking history and then using that
history to tell a much bigger story, a story of power, loss of power, and then
how we survive alone.

Ronald Regan also
suffered from Alzheimer’s. I know that they were political cronies and they’ve even
been compared to one another. When Thatcher’s daughter revealed the details of
her mother’s dementia, Ronald Regan, Jr. called it “in monumentally bad taste
and unnecessary.” Why do you think Alzheimer’s is stigmatized the way that it
is?

PL: The mind is still a largely unknown country. I think
that one of our biggest fears — beyond cancer [and] heart disease — is a fear
of going into that place of losing control, losing our identities, losing
ourselves. And it’s a terror like a terror of death — a kind of living death — reverting
to being a baby in an adult’s body. You can have a conversation with a friend
about what it felt like to be diagnosed with breast cancer, what it felt like
to go on that journey, etc. but it’s hard to talk to somebody [about having
dementia].

Were you afraid that
showing Margaret Thatcher with dementia would expose a side of her that her
supporters or the British public in general wouldn’t want to see?

PL: We talked a great deal about the morality of showing a
living person who might not be able to defend themselves in this state of
frailty, but as this had been put into the public domain by her daughter, we
felt that it could be discussed openly, and I was pretty confident that Meryl
Streep would take care of Margaret Thatcher’s dignity. Given that we wanted to
create empathy for the condition, we were hardly likely to make her an object
of ridicule.

There’s been a lot of
buzz around Streep’s performance. She’s already been nominated for a Golden
Globe, and there’s even Oscar buzz.

PL: Obviously, we are all rooting for her — and that’s an
understatement! But somebody did actually say to me, ‘How did you manage to
persuade Margaret Thatcher to make an appearance in this movie?’

You worked with Meryl
Streep in the past on Mamma Mia! When
this project first came about, did you immediately think of her?

PL: I had a moment’s pause, thinking ‘Gosh, how is England
going to take the news?’ But then I thought, ‘Oh, they’ll get over it!’ What
was interesting was, a couple of years before starting on this project, there
must have been a rumor about this film and they asked the British public, ‘Who
would you like to see playing Margaret Thatcher?’ And Meryl came out top. So I
don’t know that I knew that at the time, but there’s been surprisingly little
complaining about it. Even people who were very close to Margaret Thatcher, who
knew her very well, have been absolutely stunned by the brilliance of [Streep’s]
performance.

The film really humanized
dementia, which is often thought of as this scary, misunderstood, abstract
condition. Have you received any feedback from any mental illness
organizations?

PL: I haven’t gotten anything in writing, but we did do a
screening for a number of different organizations, including Dementia Society
in the UK. People seemed very moved by it, by the performance and by the
truthfulness of the portrayal and the sympathetic way in which it had been
drawn. We came away from that feeling encouraged that we were hopefully going
to make a small difference.

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